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Showing posts with the label Service Catalog

Service Offerings and Agreements

When we think about what services we are going to offer we immediately think of the Service Catalog.  We must also consider what agreements go along with the delivery of those services.  What levels of utility and warranty are going to be expected over the life of our services?   What about services that will be supplied by external service providers; who is going to manage those?  Let’s take a look at which ITSM processes we will need to engage to ensure that we are able to strategize, design, deliver and maintain services that will meet our customers’ needs over the lifetime of the services. In Service Offerings and Agreements (SOA), we look at Service Portfolio Management (SPM), Financial Management (FM), Demand Management (DM) and Business Relationship Management (BRM).  These are all processes within the Strategy stage of the Lifecycle.  We also explore Service Catalog Management (SCM), Service Level Management (SLM) and Supplier Management (SM) processes within the Design st

The Technical Catalog

As most of us are already aware, the business of IT has become even more critical in ensuring the overall success of an organization.  In today’s fast pace and fluid environments the statement that “every business decision triggers and IT event” is becoming increasingly true for those of us who operate in the world of ITSM. One of the most valuable tools that we can employ is our service catalog.  In a mature ITIL organization we can have two views of this catalog. The first being the Business/Customer catalog where we connect our customers/users to the standard IT services that we offer, deliver and support.  The second view is the Technical/Supporting service catalog, which when appropriately maintained is a very powerful tool that allows us to relate IT services to our supporting services and the underlying supporting infrastructure.  It is this second view that we will review here. Our service catalog provides us with a central source of information on all of the IT servi

Service Offerings and Agreements - Service Catalogs

What is the difference between a Business Service Catalog and a Request Fulfillment Catalog?  One clear way to distinguish the type of service catalog that is required is to ask yourself, who is your audience?  I have found that when a lot of IT organizations say that they have a Service Catalog many are talking about a service catalog for end users.  Another very important service catalog is one that is mapped to your business customer needs.  In this blog I will briefly discuss some characteristics of service catalogs for these very distinct audiences and for the purpose of clarity I will refer to them as Request Fulfillment and Business Service Catalog. Request Fulfillment Service Catalog Service providers today are striving to automate the first line support for user request fulfillment by providing self-help and also more importantly self-serve end user request fulfillment catalogs.  This self-serve catalog is the most common and allows users to fulfill requests directly fro

Service Catalog

The service catalogue is a data base or structured document with information about all live IT services, including those available for deployment.   The service catalogue is the only part of the service portfolio published to customers and is used to support the sale and delivery of IT services.   The service catalogue includes information about deliverables, prices, contact points, ordering and request processes. Service catalogs act as knowledge management tools for the employees of an organization, allowing them to route their requests for and about services and services to the subject matter experts who own, are accountable for, and operate them. It is a means of centralizing all services that are important to the employees, users and management of the organizations which use it. The service catalog acts as a digital registry and a means for highly distributed businesses to see, find, and execute services regardless of where they exist in the world. This means that people in

The Evolution of a Definition

The definition of an IT service has certainly evolved: IT Service   (ITILv1) :     A set of related functions provided by IT systems in support of one or more business areas, which in turn may be made up of software, hardware and communications facilities, perceived by the customer as a coherent and self-contained entity. An IT service may range from access to a single application, such as a general ledger system, to a complex set of facilities including many applications, as well as office automation, which might be spread across a number of hardware and software platforms. IT Service   (ITILv2) :     A set of related components provided in support of one or more business processes. The service will comprise a range of   Configuration Item   ( CI ) types but will be perceived by   Customers   and   Users as a self-contained, single, coherent entity. IT Service   (ITILv3) :   A   Service   provided to one or more   Customers , by an   IT Service Provider . An IT Service is base

#SMFlashbook – Best Tip(s) for Building a Service Catalog

This blog is being posted today as part of a larger community effort to publish common topic blogs on the same day.   I encourage you to review the other blogs on this subject by searching the hashtag #SMFlashbook. I was simultaneously confused and disappointed by the recent itSMF/Forrester survey results that indicated a large number of organizations had not built a Service Catalog due to lack of funding.     I am also always confused when organizations move forward with their Service Management initiatives without first defining their services.   So I challenge you with a question:   How can you manage services if you do not have a clear understanding of the services that you provide?   Here are some very simple and virtually free tips for creating an initial and meaningful Service Catalog: Step away from your tool.     The first steps can be captured on paper, whiteboards or in documents.   The tool part will come later. Gather stakeholders and collectively define an

ITIL at the Service Desk

Trends such as mobile computing, consumerization (also known as bring your own device (BYOD), and cloud computing are having a dramatic impact on the service desk. These trends are prompting many organizations to evaluate and improve their existing service management processes , or implement new processes where needed, and to rethink the role the service desk plays in implementing, executing and improving these processes. It would be easy to look at these trends and think of them only as the deployment of new technologies but there are bigger considerations at stake. What services are these technologies enabling? What business processes do these services underpin? How is the business impacted when these services are interrupted? An important key performance indicator (KPI) for service catalog management is whether the service desk has the information that it needs about those services and their associated interfaces and dependencies. This is because the service desk plays

Service Design Package (SDP) and the Service Catalog

Both the Service Design Package (SDP) and the Service Catalog are produced in the service design stage of the service lifecycle and to some extent both drive the activities that happen in all subsequent stages of the service lifecycle.   The SDP will detail all aspects of a service and its requirements throughout the entire lifecycle.   A service design package is produced for all new services, major changes to an existing service or the removal of a retired service.    From a high level the service design package will contain the following: ·     Business requirements ·     Service applicability requirements (how/where used) ·     Service contracts ·     Service functional requirements ·     Service and operational management requirements ·     Service design and topology (including service definition and model ·     Organizational readiness assessment ·     Service Program (timescales and phasing of transition, operation and improvement of the new s

Why are IT Services So Hard to Define? (Part 1)

A Service Catalog is one of the first assets that an organization should build when initiating their Service Management program.  After all, how can you manage services if you do not have a clear understanding what services your IT organization provides? Unfortunately, many organizations struggle with obtaining agreement on the scope and definition of end-to-end, business enabling services.  If left unchecked, these struggles can turn political and widen the divide between IT and the business as well as cause conflict between internal IT units.  To avoid some of the potential challenges in service definition exercises, here are some helpful suggestions: Set the stage by providing IT staff with a chart of business processes and begin integrating business vocabulary into service parameters ("Order Processing" not "Ecommerce").   Have business stakeholders conduct "lunch and learn" presentations that educate IT on how each unit uses IT Services.  Start

The Difference Between a Service and a Good

What is the difference between a service and a good? When answering questions like these, I attempt to look at things from a simplified view. I try to stay away from complexity and decompose or deconstruct the parts of an answer to its most basic form. As a result, for me the difference between a service and good is very simple. A service is intangible (an abstraction or an idea) while a good is tangible (having physical characteristics). In terms of the creation or production of each, they are both “manufactured” or “created” using the exact same approach. Raw materials are “processed” into a finished output. So both services and goods could be considered “products” of a manufacturing “process.” In this way services and goods are the same thing. The difficulty arises for many people when it comes to the idea of “manufacturing” services. Because they can see, taste, smell or feel a service as it makes its way through the “manufacturing” process, they end up thinking or believing that